Clockmaker
by kusegoto
Summary: (Мор. Утопия / Pathologic) Her history is in fragments. She parses her memory and finds it is cold. Aglaya Lilich from Pathologic. Light Aglaya/Yulia.


I was born during an epidemic.

My sister and I survived our younger brother. Our mother would later say she wished he could have lived a little longer. I do not know my father but we are not starving. I go to my brother's funeral and I watch my family grieve in ways I cannot parse. The sky is cut in two, between clouds and grey.

A family friend has a dacha in the countryside, out where the cities disappear and you can't tell them apart from the mountains on the horizon. When we visit the dacha, my sister meets a young man her age and she decides to marry him. Her name is Nina and she will become Nina the Wild. Her fiance's name is Victor and he claims to be a timemaker. He shows us both a clock he has made. Nina is enchanted. I touch it and feel the wood sing the metronome's melody.

She moves to his town when she is twenty and I attend her wedding. Her dress rolls into the grass and there are children holding bushels of grass up towards her. They all have names - both the children and the plants - but I do not learn them. I meet Victor's twins-but-not brothers. When Nina kisses her husband I am reminded that I do not like my sister and wish nothing but ill on her marriage. I am older than her and I have never had a man propose to me.

When I return home there is a letter from the Capital's defence among my school studies. My mother struggles to read the card as she is blind in one eye but she memorizes how my name is spelt. I lift the thick card and learn that I have been chosen for a special program. I know the program because I recognize the signature of an inquisitor who recently announced resignation. In his last act, he summons me by name.

I do not marry a man from the Capital. I do not marry a man from the steppe villages, either, where I am promised money and an endless field to build my dreams by my brothers-in-law. I do not fall ill with my own madness after two children and die of disease no one can name. I do not become my sister and I am not happy about this result. I do not grieve when I learn of her passing during my studies. I don't often allow myself to be better than her, but I am the last to remain of my mother's children.

I solve problems that others shy from. I create answers out of nothing. I solve the cause of a worker's riot and make the right decision to allow the toppling of a dying business. I learn why children go missing and I execute the woman responsible for collecting their toys. I become what I never admired and I look upon my accomplishments with acceptance. My mother passes away when I turn thirty in the winter. I am the only one I recognize at her funeral. My father does not attend.

There is a woman. She is different than the women I have known. She is interested in architecture and literature but admits she reads stories for the sake of stories. She convinces me to start smoking and we spend any time that we can on her campus. Her humour is dry, like cold skin. But she is kind. She tangles one hand into my hair and says I should grow it out as much as I can. I tell her it has to remain short, and she tells me I should tie it up once it gets too long.

I like her. She is one of the few who I am honest with. But I do not allow it to last long. I cut our strings and let her go. I refuse to call it cowardice, but I allow it to sting like a betrayal. She runs to the countryside and I am once again alone. Everyone runs to the grasslands except me.

I fail to satisfy my country. I fail to satisfy the powers that control us. I am sent to solve one last problem. I am sent to the steppe. I am born again in an epidemic.

My niece does not survive and dies the same way her mother did, ravaged in sickness and believing in her own mind. My nephew has not been seen from his impossible tower in weeks; neither of my two remaining brothers-in-law will look at me. Yulia is gone. She, too, dies of the pest. I find out she is buried in a mass grave and that her sponsors did not care to bury her themselves.

I meet a man who is so free that he has a language to describe it. I cannot wrap my tongue around the people of the steppe. I watch this man keep the earth alive so he can honour the miracle of history. The tower is more alive than anyone in this town could be. The man was a token, and then he becomes a force of will. He does not care where fate guides him. He says his story is about blood.

He is one of the few kind men I have met. He says I can hide in the town, but that is not possible. I warn him that if he tries to keep me here, they will kill him and his victory will mean nothing.

I depart on the twelfth day. I will die when I return to the Capital. I question only why the strings of a puppet fall as they do. I dream of buttons and string and I wake suffocated. I am born once again.


End file.
